Got issues with women, too.
I’ve hooked up hundreds of times since I transitioned and had a grand total of zero relationships. It’s not the sex—at least, once I figured out what the fuck I was doing. They came. I didn’t. Fine with me. No way would I get vulnerable with a stranger. It played out in my head: closeness, intimacy, her inevitable dismay when I refused to receive pleasure. Don’t you want me to make you feel good? she’d say, but I’d always hear, What’s wrong with you? Then came sympathy, concern. Attempts to fix me.
What is it about broken men that’s so fucking irresistible to women? Don’t they realize they deserve better?
I kept things short and sweet. Satisfied the urge, moved on before it became longing. Lived with that constant low-level loneliness and thought: This is safe. If I don’t get invested, I can’t be hurt.
What’s wrong with me? I’d asked Armin. I’m becoming another male cliché. All I have is meaningless, emotionless sex. Is this really what guys are like?
No, he said. It’s what you’re like.
Thanks, doc.
Years ago I’d made a mistake. I let someone in too far. Let her twist around my heart like barbed wire, and when I tried to pull free she ripped me to shreds. She loved that heart but not the body it was trapped inside, not the way that body was changing. Ingrid fucked me up pretty good. There was only one real way out of that pain, I decided. So I put a belt around my neck, just to see how it would feel. It felt good. It felt like a solution. So I tied the belt to a timber beam in my closet, to see how that would feel.
They strapped me to a stretcher, after. Pricked me with silver needles (later Inge would prick me, 0.5 cc of T every other week), kept me in Velcro cuffs in the ER. I couldn’t stop throwing up. Compression of the vagus nerve. The vomit wire. For a while I was more in danger of dying from dehydration.
Why did you do it? the doctor asked, and I said, Because this body is a cage.
That got me referred to a gender therapist, finally.
My parents didn’t visit. They told my sisters the suicide attempt succeeded. I almost expected a thank-you card. Ingrid sat at my bedside, stroking my hand. I don’t want to lose you, Sofie, she’d said.
And I thought, But you already have.
Laney told me how, in the hospital after her mother’s suicide, she’d felt like a ghost. People looked through her. When she spoke, no one seemed to hear. As if she were the dead one. It was like she killed us both, Laney said. Like she’d taken me with her.
That was what being trans felt like. Dead to my family. To my sisters, to Ingrid. To the trophies and newspaper clippings and girls’ basketball scholarship, to all I’d done as her I’m still me, I said, still the same person inside. But no one heard or saw. They looked at old pictures, crying.
Sometimes I was so sure of who I was.
And sometimes, like tonight, I felt like a stranger standing in someone else’s life. Not even knowing myself.
One thing always grounded me: human touch.
This girl, Norah, had tenacity. She’d propositioned me once and I turned her down because Don’t fuck fans. But she kept coming back. One night she danced with Blythe and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The firm curve of her ass in her sheath dress. The velvety girl-down on her arms, glistening with peach-juice sweat. When she turned toward me, her dark hair curled in fingers of shadow at her throat. The animal in me roused. We spoke through glances, and Blythe bowed out as I stepped in. No conversation but body language: fingernails scraping stubble, hip bones colliding. Her softness molding to me like silk on stone. Norah ran her palm up the inside of my thigh and I grazed my rough cheek against her neck. Without words we left the dance floor, our fingers knotted loosely. I led her to a room under renovation, the walls half torn apart, wood like snapped bones and insulation frothing out, all the seams and guts showing, and in a darkness pierced by pins of streetlight I pressed her to a concrete pillar, my mouth on hers. Her thighs spread, lips parting. This. I could never get over this. How right it felt, a girl opening herself to me. How badly I wanted her to hold my whole body. How badly I wanted to be inside her. I slipped a hand beneath her dress and rubbed her panties till they clung wetly to her pussy. She clutched my dick, squeezing.
That’s right. I have a dick.
And it was as hard as any man’s would be.
“I’m going to fuck you,” I growled, and nipped the ear I spoke into.
Her spine arched. She tugged my fly. “Fuck me with this.”
I let her open it a little, then pushed her hand away. When she gripped my crotch again I shoved my weight into it, let her feel all the heft and hardness of my body on hers. Small hands grasped at the slab muscle of my back. Nothing gets a man off more than feeling how desperately someone wants his dick. And she wanted mine.